As publisher of The Sporting News from 1914 until his death, he oversaw production of a weekly newspaper so indispensable to the baseball fraternity that it was venerated for decades as the “Bible of Baseball.” Players, managers, umpires, executives, broadcasters, sportswriters, and fans felt compelled to read The Sporting News each week for its mixture of news, features, statistics, opinions and “inside dope.”

At the head of this enterprise stood the diminutive and indefatigable Spink. Addicted to long hours, married to the telephone, and obsessed with accuracy, he achieved legendary status for both himself and his publication.

John George Taylor Spink was born in St. Louis on November 6, 1888. His uncle, Al Spink, had started publishing The Sporting News two years before as an all-sports weekly, but his father, Charles Spink, soon took control of the business and focused the newspaper on baseball. When Charles died suddenly in 1914 after attending the St. Louis Terriers’ opening Federal League game, Taylor found himself at the head of a rather substantial business.

He was no mere rookie. Having broken in as an office boy, he had done editorial work on The Sporting News and The Sporting Goods Dealer, a profitable monthly trade magazine, and in 1909 had created The Sporting News Record Book, which was published continuously through 2008. Moreover, Spink served as the American League’s official scorer during the World Series, a position given to him by Ban Johnson; this was a return favor for Charles Spink’s support of Johnson’s successful quest to gain major league status for the American League.

Taylor immediately made two significant editorial changes. Having criticized his late father for employing only two full-time reporters, Spink made the paper livelier, more current, and more authoritative by creating a network of correspondents, one for each major league team. He also withdrew editorial support from the Federal League, aligning TSN with organized baseball and against The Sporting Life, an East Coast competitor that went out of business shortly thereafter.

The Sporting News began naming its own major league all-star team in 1925 and selecting its own players of the year in 1929. Spink extended his influence by publishing the first edition of Daguerreotypes, a series of biographical and statistical sketches of old players, in 1934, and the first annual Baseball Register in 1940. Two years later, when the A.G. Spalding and Brothers Company discontinued publication of its annual baseball guide, Spink prevailed upon commissioner Kenesaw Landis to award him the contract. All these books soon became standard sources for baseball research.

Throughout the world of American sports journalism, Spink was regarded as a character—gruff, demanding, competitive, impatient, and dedicated to getting the story. Most of those who exalted him also felt his wrath but respected him all the same.

Near the end of Spink’s life, some sportswriters advanced the unprecedented idea that he should be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Journalists were not eligible for induction, and the Hall of Fame declined to change its rules. In response, the New York chapter of the BBWAA gave Spink its Bill Slocum Memorial Award in January 1962 for “long and meritorious service to baseball,” and the national BBWAA unanimously adopted a resolution creating the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for outstanding baseball writing. This award is presented annually at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Spink, posthumously, was the first recipient.

In 1969, following a two-year stint as PR director for the soccer association known both as the United Soccer League and the North American Soccer League, Kachline replaced Lee Allen as historian at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In this role, Kachline acquired many large file collections which might otherwise have been thrown out: financial records from the Yankees, contract cards from the National Association (the governing body of the minor leagues), and documents from the commissioner’s office, among others. He wrote the text on the plaques for new honorees and the placards for most of the exhibits in the museum.

Kachline was also one of SABR’s founding members. When the group convened for the first time in August 1971, the meeting took place just outside Kachline’s office in the Hall of Fame library. Kachline spent eight years on the SABR board, including two as its president. In 1983 he was named the group’s first Executive Director, and SABR’s headquarters moved to his house in Cooperstown. He served in this post for three years, during which time SABR’s membership grew from fewer than 2,000 to over 6,000.

Through all this, Kachline retained his doggedness for getting the facts straight, a tendency he first made clear to Taylor Spink in 1940. When Bob Feller was thought to have broken Rube Waddell’s single-season strikeout record in 1946, Kachline went through Waddell’s 1904 season game by game and found six more strikeouts, which put Rube one ahead of Feller. His connections throughout baseball helped him not only find discrepancies in the record books, but also work with the right groups to get the record books changed. In 1977 he first became aware that Hack Wilson might have driven home 191 runs in 1930 rather than his presumed 190. Although other researchers were involved in the case over the years, Kachline led the charge that caused the record to be changed in 1999.

Kachline and his wife Evelyn were fixtures at SABR conventions and local meetings for nearly forty years. He remained a thoughtful researcher and a friend to many throughout the world of baseball until his death in 2010 at age 88.

JOHN B. HOLWAY (1929–2024)

Looking at baseball beyond America’s major leagues has been his specialty. After a stint as a parachute lieutenant in Korea, he wrote the first book in English on Japanese baseball, Japan Is Big League in Thrills, in 1954. The next year he penned Sumo, the first English book on that subject.

Since then he has served as an economics analyst for the Voice of America, covered conferences around the world, written for major newspapers from Boston to San Diego, and covered the Olympic Games in Mexico City and Los Angeles and World Series from 1948 through 1986. He published a major oral history of the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails, Black Wings: The Men of America’s Black Air Force (1997). But it is not for this astonishing range of activity that SABR has named him to receive the Henry Chadwick Award.

John B. Holway has published many notable books on the Negro Leagues, perhaps most notably Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues (1975), a collection of interviews with the then virtually unknown Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, Bill Foster, and Willie Wells, and The Complete Book of the Negro Leagues (2000). Holway saw his first Negro League game—in which Satchel Paige’s Monarchs battled Josh Gibson’s Grays—in Washington, D.C. in 1945. It is not too much to say that without John Holway’s efforts, several Negro League stars would not have entered the Baseball Hall of Fame when they did.

Holway has also researched intently and written frequently about Ted Williams, whom he saw strike the famous home run off Rip Sewell’s eephus pitch in the 1946 All-Star Game.

I was sitting in right field in Fenway Park … when Ted came up for his last at bat against blooper-ball pitcher Rip Sewell. Ted fouled one off into the third base dugout. The next pitch was lobbed up and would fall short. I’ll never forget Ted doing a little Fred Astaire two-step hop and under-cutting the ball, which climbed up and up and up. A short fly, I moaned. But it kept soaring, and right fielder Enos Slaughter back-pedaled until the ball dropped over his head into the bullpen next to me.

Holway’s books about his favorite player include The Last .400 Hitter (1991) and Ted the Kid (2006).

A former chairman of SABR’s Negro Leagues committee, Holway has received the Bob Davids Award and the Casey Award for Blackball Stars, voted the best baseball book of 1988. His other books on black baseball include Black Diamonds, Josh Gibson, and Josh and Satch. With Dick Clark, he edited the Negro Leagues section of Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia. To do this, they undertook research into many hundreds of box scores from papers across America.

With Yoichi Nagata, John has contributed to the Japanese baseball section in many editions of Total Baseball. With John Thorn he co-authored The Pitcher (1987).

Henry Chadwick was involved with baseball from 1856 until his death in 1908. John Holway has spent a longer time contributing to the game, and baseball fans are grateful that he is still at it.

By the end of the twentieth century, bound baseball encyclopedias, despite their increasing sophistication, were no longer sufficient to address the increasing interest in baseball statistics and their analysis. At the same time, as the Internet matured and computing power multiplied, web-based solutions to this problem became feasible.

Almost single-handedly Forman fabricated and engineered what has become the go-to site to look up statistics for any baseball player or team. For serious baseball researchers, analysts, sportswriters, announcers, or historians, Baseball-Reference is often the first stop.

In creating B-R.com, Forman embraced four principles. First and most fundamentally, the site had to be useful; it needed to be comprehensive and the data easy to find. Second, any data search needed to be fast, and Forman specifically designed the site to meet this criterion. Third, Forman also understood the importance taking full advantage of the unique characteristics of the Internet. Accordingly, his site overflows with links, so that users can easily jump elsewhere on the site. Finally, Forman wanted to make the site fun, and he infused it with his own personality and with some inside jokes.

Over the past decade, Forman has refined the site to go well beyond the standard statistics found in baseball encyclopedias and transformed the way researchers can retrieve information that once was mostly inaccessible. B-R.com offers sabermetric statistics, leader boards for all categories in which a player qualified, and a list of a player’s transactions.

In his most significant enhancement, Forman harnessed information from Retrosheet to provide single-game data, splits based on those data, and a wide variety of player records, such as how a pitcher fared against every batter he faced or a list of each double a batter hit. The site can also generate a list of every starting lineup used by a team in a season, from both a defensive standpoint and the batting order. More recently he has also added a significant amount of minor league data.

Forman came to his interest in sabermetrics through Rotisserie baseball. At first limited to player rating systems, Forman soon branched out and has now authored numerous original sabermetric essays. His article “Blocking Pitches: Assessing a Catcher’s Ability to Save Runs with Bruises,” won Forman the 2006 Doug Pappas Research Award, which recognizes the best oral research presentation at the Annual Convention. Prior to launching Baseball-Reference, Forman co-founded BaseballThinkFactory.org, a website devoted to modern sabermetric analysis and discussion.

Forman grew up in small-town Iowa, the son of a high school football coach, and as a schoolboy he starred in baseball and golf. For his undergraduate studies, Forman attended Grinnell College, where he played Division III golf. After graduation, Forman continued his education at the University of Iowa, earning a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences. Forman’s Ph.D. led him to a career in academia, and he eventually became a tenured math and computer science professor at Saint Joseph’s University. As the popularity of his website grew, Forman made the difficult decision in 2006 to resign his professorship and concentrate fulltime on B-R.com.

Because of its huge, easily accessible array of baseball statistical information, the site’s popularity has exploded over the past ten years. When Forman first unveiled the site, it generated around 3,000 to 4,000 visitors per day; today that number is roughly 90,000. Forman’s creation has forever changed the way analysts, writers, and historians access and view baseball statistics. Research that might once have taken weeks or months can now be done in minutes. The richness of modern baseball analysis and historical investigation owes much to Forman’s wonderfully crafted site.

Alexander served on the history faculties at three major universities before settling in at Ohio University in 1970. Some years later, when Alexander began writing about baseball, he had one big advantage: He had already spent 20 years teaching, researching, and writing about various aspects of 20th-century American history (including books about the Eisenhower administration and the Ku Klux Klan). So when Alexander turned his attentions to his beloved baseball—specifically, to a scholarly, comprehensive biography of Ty Cobb ultimately published in 1984—he was familiar with the many tools available to the historian.

“I have wanted to do more than write a book about baseball and a particular ballplayer,” Alexander wrote in Ty Cobb. “A deeply flawed, fascinating personality, Ty Cobb would be a compelling subject even if he had been something besides a celebrated professional athlete.” Alexander’s book is a probing yet sympathetic look at one of baseball’s most fascinating men.

Alexander followed up Ty Cobb with the first scholarly biography of John McGraw, arguably the game’s most notable figure before Babe Ruth. In the New York Times, John C. Hough, Jr. wrote of that book, “Mr. Alexander blows away the golden dust of myth and weaves his history with such restraint and precision that we recognize the game of McGraw and Cobb.”

Since then, Alexander has penned books about Rogers Hornsby (1995) and Tris Speaker (2007). His oeuvre has inspired a veritable flood of copiously researched baseball biographies written by authors who learned from Alexander that it was okay to take baseball seriously.

But Alexander has written other sorts of baseball books, too. In 1992, Henry Holt published Our Game: An American Baseball History. In 2003, Alexander’s Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era garnered the Seymour Medal, awarded by SABR to “the best work of baseball history or biography published in the preceding year.” This summer, Southern Methodist University Press will publish his latest work, Turbulent Seasons: Baseball in 1890–1891.

For nearly all of those years, Alexander continued to teach at Ohio University, ultimately retiring in 2007 as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History. Alexander now lives in Butler County, Ohio, with JoAnn Erwin Alexander, his wife of 51 years.